was the work of Isis while her brother Osiris was conquering the world. Widowhood did not always entirely disqualify her. If she belonged to the solar race, and the new sovereign was a minor, she acted as regent by hereditary right, and retained the authority for some years longer.* * The best-known of these queen regencies is that which occurred during the minority of Thûtmosis III., about the middle of the XVIIIth dynasty. Queen Tûaû also appears to have acted as regent for her son Ramses II. during his first Syrian campaigns. It occasionally happened that she had no posterity, or that the child of another woman inherited the crown. In that case there was no law or custom to prevent a young and beautiful widow from wedding the son, and thus regaining her rank as Queen by a marriage with the successor of her deceased husband. It was in this manner that, during the earlier part of the IVth dynasty, the Princess Mirtîttefsi ingratiated herself successively in the favour of Snofrûi and Kheops.* Such a case did not often arise, and a queen who had once quitted the throne had but little chance of again ascending it. Her titles, her duties, her supremacy over the rest of the family, passed to a younger rival: formerly she had been the active companion of the king, she now became only the nominal spouse of the god,** and her office came to an end when the god, of whom she had been the goddess, quitting his body, departed heavenward to rejoin his father the Sun on the far-distant horizon. Children swarmed in the palace, as in the houses of private individuals: in spite of the number who died in infancy, they were reckoned by tens, sometimes by the hundred, and more than one Pharaoh must have been puzzled to remember exactly the number and names of his offspring.*** * M. de Rougé was the first to bring this fact to light in his _Becherches sur les monuments qu’on peut attribuer aux six premières dynasties de Manéthon,_ pp. 36-38. Mirtîttefsi also lived in the harem of Khephren, but the title which connects her with this king--_Amahhit_, the vassal--proves that she was then merely a nominal wife; she was probably by that time, as M. de Rougé says, of too advanced an age to remain the favourite of a third Pharaoh. ** The title of “divine spouse” is not, so far as we know at present, met with prior to the XVIIIth dynasty. It was given to the wife of a living monarch, and was retained by her after his death; the divinity to whom it referred was no other than the king himself. *** This was probably so in the case of the Pharaoh Ramses II., more than one hundred and fifty of whose children, boys and girls, are known to us, and who certainly had others besides of whom we know nothing. [Illustration: THE QUEEN SHAKES THE SISTKUJU WHILE THE KING OFFERS THE SACRIFICE]